


sounds like penance

by ceserabeau



Series: Avengers AU [4]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Marvel Avengers Fusion, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1796758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceserabeau/pseuds/ceserabeau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek trusts Peter: with his company, with his money, with his sister. He trusts Peter with his life, right up until the moment Peter reaches a hand into his chest and pulls his glowing lifeline out with a smug smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sounds like penance

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Richard Siken's [Unfinished Duet](http://theysaid.livejournal.com/1492580.html)

Once upon a time, Derek was polite and kind. He used to say _please_ and _thank you_ , used to have soft edges and a gentle smile.

Those things have long since been trained out of him.

First there was a car crash, his family ripped away from him without warning. Then there was college and Jennifer, seductive and so very dangerous; the aftermath, trying to dig a hole to bury himself in. And after that that shaky semi-sobriety and rebuilding his company from the ground up, working himself to the point of exhaustion and working some more.

So if anything, Derek feels he has a right to his sharp edges and smug smiles. He has taken himself from the lowest of the low and built himself up to be the best of the best. He, and his company, are indispensible, irreplaceable. People may hate him, but he’s on top of the world.

Which is why, when it quite literally blows up in his face, he never saw it coming.

-

Derek loves Peter, like an uncle, like a father. He’s family, one of the few people Derek has left. He’s seen Derek at his worst, at his lowest ebbs: drink and drugs, girls and guns. Peter is the experience to Derek’s genius, the one who tamed the rebellious heir to Hale Industries. He is the one that picked Derek up and put him back on his feet.

So Derek trusts Peter: with his company, with his money, with his sister. He trusts Peter with his life, right up until the moment Peter reaches a hand into his chest and pulls his glowing lifeline out with a smug smile.

“When I ordered the hit on you,” Peter whispers, low and sinuous, “I was worried I was killing the golden goose.”

Derek can’t tell if the ice in his veins is shock or fear. He can’t quite believe that Peter, the only man who ever believed that Derek could put himself back on his feet and become the leader his mother had always believed his could be, sent him willingly to his death in the dark depths of an Afghan cave. But now he can see the darkness lurking in Peter’s eyes, as plain as day, and he wonders how he ever missed it.

“It was fate that you survived,” Peter tells him, fingers tapping and twisting. “You had one last golden egg to give.”

Then he pulls, and Derek’s world narrows down to the sudden hole in his chest. It’s as if he can feel the shrapnel starting to move in his chest, dragging sharp through his veins, trails of pain flaring along his insides.

“This is your ninth symphony, Derek,” Peter says as he holds up the reactor, bright and blue and blinding. “This is your legacy.”

And Derek watches the man who was uncle, father, friend, turn to monster before his eyes.

-

When all is said and done, after half of Hale Industries explodes in his face, after Peter is buried six feet under the ground in a dozen charred pieces, after he accidentally on purpose reveals to the world that he’s a superhero in a metal suit, Derek doesn’t feel any of the relief he thought he would.

He sits in his lab and stares at his tools and wonders if he can be the person he’s claiming to be. Iron Man, superhero, defender of the downtrodden and all that bull. All the things he’s never been, has never wanted to be, and yet here he is with it as an addendum to his name.

He must sit there for a long time, because eventually the door clicks open and Cora appears with a box of pizza that smells delicious. She picks her way through the bots and flops onto the bench next to him.

“I am Iron Man?” she asks, voice loud and angry in the stillness of the lab. “What made you think that was a good idea?”

“Felt right,” Derek says, and looks up to see her face soften.

“You’re an idiot,” Cora tells him. Then she smiles brightly like Derek hasn’t seen in a long time. “I’m proud of you.”

Derek ducks his head, reaches over to wrap an arm around her shoulder. “Thanks,” he whispers in her hair, and lets himself be manhandled to his feet to the ringing sound of her laughter.

-

Cora finds Derek a shrink who specialises in PTSD. Her name is Penny and she’s five foot three, with perfectly manicured nails and a mole under her left eye. She’s writes slanting to the left, and the skin on her hands is baby smooth.

Derek isn’t sure when he started noticing these things, but it’s like a switch has been flicked in his brain. Before it was chemicals and equations and formulas, and now it’s threat assessment and analysing the details and fearfearfear.

He makes sure that he talks in every session. About his childhood, Cora and college. About his narcissism and his superiority complex, all the things he’s ever been diagnosed as. About the booze and the girls, about falling down the rabbit hole and having to drag himself out again. About Afghanistan: the heat and the smell and the flies. About Hale Industries and his plans for the future.

Derek talks and talks and talks; he just doesn’t say a lot. Penny pushes, but Derek can never make the words come out.

He can’t talk about how the first splatter of blood from the soldier’s went into his mouth and he tasted death for the first time, bitter on his tongue. He can’t talk about the feeling of water flooding into his body: in his nose, in his mouth, blinding him, drowning him. He can’t talk about the cave piled high with bodies with holes in their chests, Yinsen laid out bloody and burnt amongst them.

He can’t talk about the knowledge that he did this to himself and how it eats him up like acid from the inside out.

-

To most people Alan Deaton is a scary man. Happy says it’s the eye patch. Cora says it’s because he only has one expression. Either way, Derek isn’t scared by men these days, so when he finds Deaton in his house in the middle of the night he doesn’t even bother pretending to flinch.

“Do you enjoy sitting in the dark?” he asks when he pads up from the lab at three in the morning in search of some much needed caffeine to discover Deaton sitting on his couch.

Across the room, Deaton makes a disapproving noise. “Do you enjoy making me wait?”

Derek clicks the light on and finds himself under the full force of one of Deaton’s heavy glares. “I won’t pretend I don’t know who you are – that would be rude. But I am wondering what you’re doing in my house. And what you did to Jarvis.”

“Your AI will be fine,” Deaton says. “I’m here to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative.”

Derek raises an eyebrow. “Sounds like a bad movie title,” he tells him.

Deaton’s lips give a small twitch. “I suppose it is,” he says, pushing himself to his feet with a grunt. Derek watches the way his coat swings as he stands. “I’m putting together a team, a group of extraordinary people who can defend this country – this planet – better than any army can.”

“And this involves me how?”

“You’re not the only superhero, Mr Hale,” Deaton says, talking a few steps forward, “But you are the only one who has proved successful in the field. I want you on board.”

Derek scoffs. “So you’re telling me you want to put together a motley crew of comic book stars with me at the helm? Sounds like a real party.”

Deaton shakes his head. “The world needs something extraordinary, Hale. And you are it.”

Derek laughs; it comes out harsher than he means. “I’m not,” he says, and finds his voice cracks a little over the words. “Go find someone else to be your figurehead.”

Deaton watches him from across the room and Derek finally appreciates what Happy and Cora were talking about, because the blank stare he’s getting is making his skin start to crawl. It’s unnerving, until Deaton suddenly spins on his heels and turns to look out the window at the inky black sea.

“I know you think you’re not interested now,” he says, voice deep and echoing around the curves of the room. “But you’re a good man, Hale, and sooner or later the world will need you. You need to think about what you’re going to do when that time comes.”

Derek feels a chill sweeping across his skin, settling in his bones. Deaton’s right, but Derek isn’t big on giving people the satisfaction of knowing that they’re getting to him, so in the end he just gestures towards the door.

“I’m sure you can find your own way out,” he says, and finally goes to get that coffee he was looking for.

-

Cora complains that he’s not getting enough sleep, but Derek prefers the bright lights of the lab to the cloying darkness of his bedroom. In the dark there is only pain and fear and guilt; he’ll take bags under his eyes and caffeine jitters any day.

Down in the lab, Derek passes his time by breaking the suit into pieces and rebuilding it over and over. He burns the skin off his fingers with soldering irons and smashes his fingers with hammers, covers himself with cuts and bruises until it hurts to hold anything.

He doesn’t make much progress with making the suit better, but it gives him an excuse any time Cora comes down looking for him, arms piled high with paperwork. There are a hell of a lot of documents to sign, seeing as how he destroyed half of Hale Industries and killed his business partner, and he pretends like he’s way too busy every time she appears in the doorway.

“You need to start taking an interest in your company, Derek,” she shouts at him when he orders Jarvis to lock her out. “You’re the one that wanted to be CEO – you need to start taking responsibility!”

“Can’t hear you,” he mouths at her, and ducks his head when he sees her face scrunching up in anger.

“ _Fuck you_ ,” he hears through the glass. “Hiding down here isn’t going to make your problems go away. When you’re ready to act like an adult, you know where to find me.”

When Derek looks up, she’s turned sharply on her heel and is storming away. Her footsteps echo in the stairwell, sharp staccato beats, and all he can think of is the bullets ricocheting off walls. When they finally fade away, he drops his head into his hands and tries to remember how to breathe.

-

Derek makes Cora CEO of Hale Industries – which in retrospect he probably should have done a long time ago. He gets almost-murdered by a crazy Russian with electric whips and one hell of a grudge. He gets poisoned by his reactor and invents a new element to save his own life.

All in all, it’s one of his better months.

-

Agent Martin is a cold-hearted bitch, with fantastic hair and even more fantastic rack. Derek contemplates hitting on her for thirty seconds before she breaks a guy’s neck with her thighs. After that, he steers well clear.

Except he can’t, because Deaton has apparently tasked her with being his shadow. Cora tolerates it too, ostensibly for Derek’s safety, which means Martin spends most of her day sitting in Derek’s lab cleaning her guns.

“Don’t you have something better to do?” he asks her, watching her cautiously over the top of his equipment. “No top-secret missions to go on? Nobody to kill?”

Martin doesn’t answer, just keeps cleaning, hands steady and sure as she rubs the barrel carefully with the oil. Derek sends Dummy to go spy on her, but she bats him away easily without even looking up.

Derek huffs in annoyance. “Seriously, why are you here? I’m not that interesting.”

Martin’s hands don’t pause, but Derek can tell he’s caught her attention by the way her eyes flick in his direction. “You’re a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, Hale,” she says, voice level and even. “If that’s not interesting I don’t know what is.”

Derek puts his tools down and fixes her with his most unimpressed look. “And I’ve always been that. So why the sudden interest?”

Martin puts down the barrel, reaches over for the slide. “Because that’s not all you are,” she says.

Derek frowns at her. “What do you mean?”

Martin sighs, sweeping her hand at everything around them: the lab, the bots milling around, the thousands of pieces of metal strewn across every surface. She turns to him, raises her perfectly shaped eyebrows.

“Don’t you have something better to do?”

-

It’s a Wednesday, and he and Cora are barefoot in the living room. Cora’s drinking champagne straight from the bottle, a celebration for making them lots of money; Derek’s sticks to water. They watch the sun set slowly, painting the sky a myriad of colours: red, orange, pink, before it dips below the horizon and the inky black of the night sweeps over them.

“So,” Cora says, kicking her feet up onto the coffee table, “What’s next?”

Derek looks over at her. His little sister, once skinny and scared, now beautiful and brilliant, with fire in her eyes and fire in her heart. She smiles softly at him, and Derek is reminded of their mother.

“I don’t know,” he tells her, watching the way she wiggles her toes like she used to as a child. “This superhero business isn’t going as well as I hoped.”

It startles a laugh from her. “Sweetie,” she says, reaching over to pat him on the arm, “You said that about taking over Hale Industries, and look how that turned out.”

Derek chuckles. “I got kidnapped and tortured, blew up our headquarters, nearly got both of us murdered by our friend – what part of that was a good thing?”

Cora raises an eyebrow at him. “Look, I’m not trying to be a bitch here, but you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Shit happens, sometimes a _lot_ of shit, but we made it out the other side. We’re both alive, the company’s better than it ever has been, and you even managed to save the world a couple of times.” She points her champagne bottle at him. “Just - give it a chance.”

Derek turns to stare out at the bright lights of New York, spread out before them. All those people down there, all those people who believe in Iron Man, who believe in _him_.

“Yeah,” he says, “Maybe I will.”

-

It’s a Wednesday, and Agent Lahey shows up on his doorstep saying, “We need you,” and “This isn’t about personality profiles anymore,” and Derek can feel panic starting to build under his skin but he nods and smiles and says _yes_.


End file.
